【MUET】Essay - “Parents are the best teachers.”

 

“Parents are the best teachers.” Do you agree or disagree with the following statement? Use specific reasons and examples to support your answer.

I agree that parents are the best teachers up to a certain extent. Undoubtedly, they are the first teachers in a child’s life. They teach child to walk, speak, be polite and basically interact with the “real world”. Parents also have a vested interest in doing the best they can for their flesh and blood and are often committed and involved in their teaching as it is almost instinctive for them to sacrifice part of themselves for the betterment of their children. They are able to add the extra ingredient of love into their teaching and their patience often know no boundaries. Furthermore, they often spend the most time with their children especially in the earlier years of childhood and children are great imitators of their parents’ words and actions. They are like little sponges that soak up all their parents intentionally or unintentionally impart to them.

In terms of values and beliefs, it is the parents who are the best teachers too as they are able to pass on certain important values that a teacher in the school may not be partial to. There are many situations in the course of the day through family interactions that allow real-life examples of how values and life principles are lived and challenged. Children will get the best teaching through these experiences.

When the children begin to grow older, they may have other teachers in their respective schools as well as the wide world out there consisting of peers, books and the media to take some part of teaching them things. However, in cases where adolescents begin to go through developmental changes physically, mentally, emotionally and behaviourally, it is the parents who know their kids best and are able to be flexible and adapt to the changes happening in their children and offer them proper advice and teach them how to cope with those changes. Often, these situations are very delicate and private and parents have to be very sensitive. Teachers in schools or the internet are not able to perceive the fine nuances and therefore this makes parents the best teachers for their children.

On the other hand, I would say that parents are not professional teachers and they tend to be very biased by their love of their children. So, wishing good things and an easy life may prevent children from maturation. In any case, parents usually can present only one viewpoint of the world, while good teaching should be based on different attitudes. Thus, when children go to school and have a great diversity of teachers, they learn much more than their parents could probably give them. Also, teachers are trained for teaching, with their knowledge and teaching methods, they can help to educate children more effectively. For example, parents may easily find out a math solution for children, but they find it hard to explain. Whereas teachers, with their teaching methods, can find it easy to get children to find out the solution themselves. Moreover, teachers also know how to encourage children to learn more effectively, while parents probably do not. For instance, teachers always explain why children need to learn and tell them learning is an important duty. Furthermore, once our parents get older, they become more conservative and cannot always be objective in regard to modern trends and fashions. Thus, we need to take their advice with caution during that period. However, some kind of intuition which I believe shared between relatives about what everybody needs and great love which exists in some families still makes our parents very good teachers and advisers at any time.

              In conclusion, educating children is not a simple duty. However, if parents and teachers can work together, we have the right to believe that our new generations will be as expected.

Vocabulary:

vested interest (n)- a strong personal interest in something because you could get an advantage from it (既得利益)

imitators (n) - a person who copies someone or something that they think is good (模仿者)

adolescents (n) - a young person who is developing into an adult (青少年)

nuances (n) - a very slight difference in appearance, meaning, sound, etc. (外表、意义、声音等的) 细微差别

intuition (n) - (knowledge from) an ability to understand or know something immediately based on your feelings rather than facts (直觉；直觉力)